1959: The Year Everything Changed - Hardcover

Kaplan, Fred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470387815 ISBN 13: 9780470387818

Publisher: Trade Paper Press, 2009

Synopsis

Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America

While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that followed. Pop culture exploded in upheaval with the rise of artists like Jasper Johns, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Miles Davis. Court rulings unshackled previously banned books. Political power broadened with the onset of Civil Rights laws and protests. The sexual and feminist revolutions took their first steps with the birth control pill. America entered the war in Vietnam, and a new style in superpower diplomacy took hold. The invention of the microchip and the Space Race put a new twist on the frontier myth.

• Vividly chronicles 1959 as a vital, overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion, spearheading immense political, scientific, and cultural change
• Strong critical acclaim: ""Energetic and engaging"" (Washington Post); ""Immensely enjoyable . . . a first-rate book"" (New Yorker); ""Lively and filled with often funny anecdotes"" (Publishers Weekly)
• Draws fascinating parallels between the country in 1959 and today

Drawing fascinating parallels between the country in 1959 and today, Kaplan offers a smart, cogent, and deeply researched take on a vital, overlooked period in American history.

About this title

About the Author

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column in Slate, contributes frequently to the New York Times' Arts & Leisure section, and blogs about jazz for Stereophile. A Pulitzer Prize winning former Boston Globe reporter who covered the Pentagon and post-Soviet Moscow, he has also written for the New Yorker, New York, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and other publications. He is the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, also available from Wiley. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.
http://www.1959thebook.com

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed

"An engrossing story about not just where the '60s came from but the birth of the future. Kaplan does a masterful job of weaving together the strands - in politics, society, culture, and science — that have brought us to the postmodern age."
—Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

"It turns out there's only one degree of separation between Miles Davis, the brilliant jazz innovator, and Herman Kahn, the Strangelovian nuclear-war theorist—and his name is Fred Kaplan. No one else could throw this fabulous cocktail party of a popular history, teeming with defiant hipsters, visionary inventors, artistic rulebreakers, and troublemakers of all kinds."
—Hendrik Hertzberg, Senior Editor, the New Yorker

"1959 is a riveting account of the year our modern age began. Everything did change, and you'll be amazed by how much was going on, and how much it has affected the way you live your life now."
—Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row, Dreamland, and Paradise Alley

"Take a ride on the New Frontier with Fred Kaplan, your insightful (and hip) guide to the space race, thermonuclear war, the civil rights movement, the 'sick comics,' the Beats, and the beginnings of the Vietnam War, all to a soundtrack by Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Miles, and Motown."
—Donald Fagen, cofounder, Steely Dan

From the Inside Flap

It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, "sick comics," the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap-all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.

It was a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a "new frontier" that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation-a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point.

In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, acclaimed Slate columnist Fred Kaplan vividly chronicles this vital, overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion. Drawing on original research, including untapped archives and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces together the vast, untold story of a civilization in flux-and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for the new era. They include:

Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential ways; Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the language and skewering politics and religion; Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz; John Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood system; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating black urban music into mainstream pop culture; Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, suing the government's censors and toppling obscenity laws; Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and racial politics; Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life; Jack Kilby, a self-described "tinkerer," inventing the microchip, which triggers the digital age; Margaret Sanger, a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade scientists to invent a "magic pill" that lets women control their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and feminist revolutions; and John F. Kennedy, the coalescing figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young outsider, keen to grapple with the "unknown opportunities and peril" of the coming "new frontier"—just as Barack Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a new decade in our own turbulent time.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1959

The Year Everything ChangedBy Fred Kaplan

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Fred Kaplan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-38781-8

Chapter One

Breaking the Chains

On January 2, 1959, a Soviet rocket carrying the Lunik I space capsule-also known as Mechta, "the dream"-blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, accelerated to twenty-five thousand miles per hour (the magical speed known as "escape velocity"), sailed past the moon, and pushed free of Earth's orbit, becoming the first man-made object to revolve around the sun among the celestial bodies. The next issue of Time magazine hailed the feat as "a turning point in the multibillion-year history of the solar system," for "one of the sun's planets had at last evolved a living creature that could break the chains of its gravitational field."

The flight of the Lunik set off a year when chains of all sorts were broken with verve and apprehension-not just in the cosmos, but in politics, society, culture, science, and sex. A feeling took hold that the breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing.

1959 was the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and also commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it-when the world as we now know it began to take form.

Just two months before Lunik, "the jet age" roared into being, when a brand-new Boeing 707, owned by Pan American World Airways, took off with great fanfare on the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic to Paris. On the runway, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower declared, "I christen thee `Jet Clipper America'!" before smashing a bottle of ocean water across the plane's nose and cheering with a crowd of thousands as the plane rolled down the runway while the Air Force band played "The Star-Spangled Banner." The New York Times enthused over "the possibility of hurdling an ocean from one continent to another, from one world to another, in half a dozen hours"-age-old longings that were "no longer daydreams, because the jets are here."

Now, with the New Year barely under way, the world was thrust into "the space age." The Russians and the Americans would go at it-in a "space race"-all year long, back and forth, each side trumpeting some new triumph with startling alacrity.

Outer space and lightning speed animated the popular consciousness. Mass-circulation magazines and newspapers ran lengthy articles explaining the "new geography" of solar orbits and galaxies. NASA lingo-"blast off," "countdown," "A-OK"-swooshed into the everyday lexicon. Madison Avenue picked up on the coinage with advertisements touting new products-from cars to telephones to floor waxes-as "jet age," "space age," "the world of the future," "the countdown to tomorrow."

And tomorrow promised to be not just another day but a new dawn. The era's rising young political star, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would run for president on a slogan of "Leadership for the '60s"-the first time that the future was defined in terms of a decade, which presumed to hold out both menace and hope but in either case great change. Kennedy presented his youth as a virtue-another reversal of the norm-describing himself as a man "born in this century," keen to explore "the New Frontier."

The phrase was a reference to Frederick Jackson Turner's classic essay of 1893, "The Frontier in American History," which argued that the "American character"-its "restless, nervous energy" and "dominant individualism"-was a product of the frontier's vast emptiness, with its prospect of a continuous "expansion westward," each step siring "new opportunities" for conquest, settlement, and "perennial rebirth."

By the 1950s, this frontier had long been filled and settled. The new frontier now lay in outer space, and its prospect of seemingly infinite expansion set off a new wave-a new way of seeing and experiencing on Earth.

The space program itself, and the markets that it seemed certain to generate, spurred scientists to develop new technologies-most notably the microchip and faster, smaller computers-which would transform the fantasies of science fiction into the routines of daily life.

This enchantment with the new also galvanized a generation of artists to crash through their own sets of barriers-and attracted a vast audience that was suddenly, even giddily, receptive to their iconoclasm.

New comedians-"sick comics," some called them-satirized the once-forbidden topics of race, religion, and politics. Brazen novelists loosened the language and blurred the boundaries between author and subject, reportage and literature. Rebellious filmmakers shot improvisational movies outside the confines of Hollywood studios. Painters created a new kind of art that streaked outside the canvas. Jazz musicians improvised a new kind of music that broke through the structures of chords and pre-set rhythms. A new record label, Motown, laid down a jazz-inflected rhythm and blues that insinuated black culture into the mainstream, inspired baby-boomer rock 'n' roll, and supplied the soundtrack for the racial revolts and interminglings that lay ahead.

These currents were quickened by a series of expansive government edicts. The new United States Civil Rights Commission ordered a series of investigations on racial discrimination in voting, housing, and schools. The Supreme Court issued rulings that lifted restrictions on free speech and literature. Toward the end of the year, the Food and Drug Administration held hearings that resulted in the approval of a birth-control pill, which unleashed a revolution in women's lives and in sexual activity, unbridled and spontaneous.

Yet the thrill of the new was at once intensified and tempered by an undercurrent of dread. Outer space loomed as a frontier not only for satellites, rockets, and computers but also for missiles, H-bombs, and apocalyptic war.

And so, the year also saw panic over fallout shelters, fears of a "missile gap," and an escalation of the Cold War. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, boasted that his defense factories were churning out nuclear-tipped missiles "like sausages." In the U.S. Congress, the Joint Atomic Energy Committee held five days of public hearings on the effects of a "limited" nuclear attack. Scientists were detecting hazardous levels of radiation in milk, as a result of H-bomb tests in the atmosphere. A mordant physicist named Herman Kahn toured the country and tantalized large crowds with marathon lectures on how to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war.

It was this twin precipice-the prospect of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation, both teetering on the edge of a new decade-that gave 1959 its distinctive swoon and ignited its creative energy.

The latter half of the preceding decade, especially from 1945 to 1947, when America created the bomb, won World War II, and emerged as a sprawling global power, also marked a vivid turning point. But the generation in control before the war remained in control just after. The most talented among them adapted well to the expansion of their domain. They devised new institutions and strategies-political, economic, and military-that rebuilt the West and allowed the emerging American superpower to advance its interests without triggering World War III. But these men tended to view nations as static pieces on a chessboard; the elites of the opposing superpower did the same, more harshly still; and the smaller pieces on the board, devastated by six years of brutal warfare, could manage little in the way of resistance-as yet. At home, these leaders saw the end of the war as a time to restore the old order-unaware that although the American homeland was physically intact, its social fabric had unraveled.

It would take another dozen years before the nation set out, or stumbled forth, in a clear new direction-before it responded to the shifting contours and redefined itself in their light and shadows. The new path was carved by the younger generation, those who grew up through depression and war-and who felt dissatisfied with the false peace that followed: bent out of shape, or spurred to revolt, by the dissonance between the new era's promised hopes and palpable fears. It was in the late 1950s that the war years' adolescents and young soldiers came into their own, approaching the ages of thirty or forty-too young to shove their elders out of power but old enough, and self-consciously so, to claim a stake in the future and to make themselves heard.

This raucousness reached a crescendo in the next decade-the sixties-with the sexual revolution, free speech, rock 'n' roll, campus uprisings, and racial riots, all erupting against the escalation of a savage war in Southeast Asia and the wondrous spectacle of landing a man on the moon. Yet all of these cataclysms sprang not from the impulses or ideals of the baby-boom generation but rather from the revolts and revelations of 1959-and many of the new instigators were well aware of their roots and took inspiration from their predecessors.

The truly pivotal moments of history are those whose legacies endure. And, as the mid-forties recede into abstract nostalgia, and the late sixties evoke puzzled shudders, it is the events of 1959 that continue to resonate in our own time. The dynamics that were unleashed fifty years ago and that continue to animate life today-the twin prospects of infinite expansion and total destruction-seem to be shifting to a new phase, crossing yet another new frontier.

A dramatic, though in some ways coincidental, parallel is the emergence of another young outsider elected on a promise of hope and change-though Barack Obama, born in the year of John F. Kennedy's inauguration, pushes the concept of outsider to new extremes. The son of a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father (whose own father was born Muslim), Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, went to college in California and New York and to law school at Harvard, then rose through politics in Chicago-he's not just a black man (extraordinary enough), he's multiracial, multinational, multiethnic, a man of the country, the city, the tropical islands, and beyond-the living embodiment of every late-fifties dream of smashing through barriers and integrating not merely black with white, but America with the world.

Yet the more significant parallels are the conditions surrounding the two young presidents' ascents-global power dispersing, cultures fracturing, the world shrinking, and science poised to spawn new dreams and nightmares-though, again, in Obama's time, our time, these trends appear monstrously magnified.

The distribution of global power-which once let American policy makers get by with a little knowledge about Russia and maybe China-began dispersing in the late fifties to the point where ignorance of small countries like Vietnam and Cuba got us into deadly trouble. Today the collapse of power centers, brought on by the end of the Cold War, requires political elites to know about regional tribes, separatist enclaves, stateless terrorists, to say nothing of financial interdependencies, climate change, energy alternatives, and other aspects of security that have nothing to do with traditional gauges of the military balance.

Cultural power has also devolved, as the assaults that seemed so daring fifty years ago, in painting, literature, music, and film-the idea that anything can be art, anyone can be an artist, any language is permissible, one kind of artist can also be another kind of artist, and neither age nor ethnicity determines eligibility-have insinuated themselves into the mainstream. Now the next round of splintering-already under way in blogs, iTunes, eBooks, YouTube, Twitter, News Feed, Flickr, and who knows what new forums to come-is not only broadening further the boundaries of art but stands to shatter the final barriers between artist and audience, public and private, spectacle and life.

In science and technology, the trajectory from 1959 to 2009, and likely onward to the future, is one of ever-expanding expectations of what is explorable-from the galaxies to subatomic articles and everything in between-to the point where we seem on the verge of touching infinity in all directions.

The microchip, which brought forth the digital age-with its mini-computers, multipurpose cell phones, and instantaneous access to everyone, everything, everywhere-may, over the next few decades, spark revolutions in artificial intelligence, brain-augmenting nanochips, and other devices of such minuscule size yet such gargantuan processing power that their full applications can scarcely be imagined.

Advances in biological research, which in 1959 produced a pill to control human birth-with its resulting social, economic, and cultural upheavals-may in the coming years create gene therapies and synthetic organs that long postpone human death, with still more tumultuous consequences.

There was, is, and always will be a dark side of this juggernaut to tomorrow. Just as the flip side of rockets and satellites was H-bombs and missiles, so biotechnology can also yield biohazards and bio-weapons, brain-augmentations might dehumanize the soul, the omnipresence of online networks could warp community and erode the sense of self, while the infinite fracturing of culture threatens to wipe out the concept of a shared culture, nation, or world.

In the summer of 1959, Allen Ginsberg, the generation's visionary poet of exuberance and doom, wrote in the Village Voice: "No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown.... Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city."

He might as well have written it today.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from 1959by Fred Kaplan Copyright © 2009 by Fred Kaplan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0470387815
• ISBN 13: 9780470387818
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344